


Second Light

by light_mantled_albatross



Category: Star Wars: Rebellion Era - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, oneshot for now but who can foresee the future
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-02
Updated: 2017-07-02
Packaged: 2019-05-29 18:07:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15078728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/light_mantled_albatross/pseuds/light_mantled_albatross
Summary: Ahsoka trains Leia, who has quite the knack for hitting people with blunt objects.





	Second Light

“What did you want to talk about?” she asks Bail, watching him in the colorless artificial illumination of the dim overhead lights. Here, on his small, bare diplomatic vessel: _It’s not about a mission,_ he had said, _but I need to speak with you._

He seems more tired and haggard each time she sees him. He looks up from the dull surface of his desk and meets her eyes, calm and reconciled to whatever he’s about to say, although she can sense the exhaustion that hangs from him like a physical weight. “Ahsoka,” he begins, “my daughter can use the Force.”

She keeps her face impassive. There’s always a chance he’s wrong, although before the war he’d spent enough time with the Jedi that the pessimistic part of her is pretty sure he’s right. “Why do you think that?”

Bail gives her a small, sad smile. “Little things I’ve noticed.”

Ahsoka meets his gaze grimly. “If you’re right, then she is in real danger from the Empire.”

“I’m right,” Bail says heavily. “And I know.”

“I can…” Leia is twelve standard, Ahsoka knows, because she’s as old as the Empire. It breaks Ahsoka’s heart to offer, because the Force is… the Force should be part of you. “I can teach her to hide it. To shield. To not touch it.”

Bail shakes his head. Dead serious, completely steady: “Will you train her to use it?”

Ahsoka stares at him, momentarily speechless. This is maybe the worst idea she’s ever heard, and somehow it shakes her to her core. “No. Senator Organa – I – no. I can’t.”

“She deserves to know,” he says, and the weight of it is crushing him. “She deserves to learn how. The Rebellion needs – people with the Force,” and she can hear him avoid the word _Jedi_ , because Ahsoka’s not one and he knows it. “What if she could help end all this, and we never give her the chance?”

“She’s _twelve_.”

“Thirteen, actually,” Bail corrects, and Ahsoka realizes it’s been thirteen years, not twelve, and she’s lost track. So long since the Republic fell that she’s stopped counting. “And you know the Jedi trained from infancy,” he adds.

“Not all of them,” Ahsoka counters. Not Anakin, she means. The thought of him is comforting, the memory wreathed in unspeakable, unshakable grief, but beneath all that it burns like a bright spark of hope. As time has passed, she’s started to feel as though Anakin and Obi-Wan and Plo and even Barriss and everyone else at the Temple whom she had loved has become part of her in a deep, indescribable way, the brightness of their lives held inside her, separate and apart from the horror of their deaths; and those memories warm her now.

“She deserves to learn,” Bail says again, softly. “You know how useful you are to the Rebellion,” he adds, with a tired smile. “You know how useful she could be. To fight all of it – she deserves to learn. Whether she wants to use that knowledge – that will be her decision later. But she deserves to learn.”

***

Leia runs. She runs because the ship’s about to explode, which she knows because she just planted the attobomb that’s gonna cause that to happen in the hyperdrive compartment, and she has to get to the transport before it goes off, but it’s taking her longer to get there than she thought because this stupid kriffing ship is so stupid kriffing _big_ – she runs, tearing down the empty corridor, boots slamming against the metal grating, the whole world roaring with the white-hot speed of it –

She can sense the stormtroopers coming before they appear around the corner, and she’s already drawn her blaster, and she takes down the two in the lead without breaking stride but there’s maybe ten left, too many to just dive through – she skids, slowing down – the air screams with bolts as they shoot at her, and she dodges two streaks of light without really thinking, twisting sideways to let them pass – a thin vent pipe, stretching along the wall beside her – that’ll work – she shoves the blaster back into her belt and yanks at the pipe with her left hand as she uses her right to bring the Force against seals on either end, twisting them loose – the section comes away and steam billows into the air and she’s back in the center of the corridor, but this time she’s holding just a bit over a meter of heavy metal pipe –

“ _Seven minutes!_ ” Ahsoka’s distorted voice says from the comlink on her wrist, and Leia grins, because seven minutes is an eternity, seven minutes is all the time in the universe, the Force is alive with wild exhilaration and she takes off running, charging at the troopers – they’re firing at her and she’s dodging and she knows that’s bad, the number one rule on every mission is not to show she has the Force, not to let the Empire know Ahsoka’s training another Force user, but she’s sliding between bolts and she’s almost at the stormtroopers and she whirls past the one in front – another is in her path, he’s raising his blaster – 

“Outta my way, bucketbrain,” she snaps, and whacks him as hard as she can with the pipe. He staggers backwards and she slams another trooper behind her before he can fire – then she’s dodging another and there’s one in her way with a T52 Class 3 plasma rifle, she’s caught up in her own momentum and she floors him with the pipe and then she’s spinning sideways, whirling through a haze of plastoid armor and white-hot blaster bolts that burn through the Force, there’s energy everywhere around her and she can feel the screaming motion and she wheels between it all, she smashes another weapon that someone was stupid enough to aim at her and the idiot holding it staggers backwards and there’s another laserbrained gizka trying to shoot at her from behind but she’s already turning her shoulder, slipping past the bolt, and he’s about to try again but she’s not kriffing having it and she elbows him in the face, she ducks and another streak of red plasma shrieks past her and a trooper beside her goes down and there’s her opening, she sees it and she’s through and she’s sprinting down the corridor as fast as she can go, she’s got a reverse grip on the pipe and she blocks three bolts aimed at her back in one whirling motion and then she’s around the corner and she’s got two hundred meters to go – 

*

The door of the transport flies open and Leia tumbles in, out of breath, dark gray flight jacket askew.

Ahsoka glances at the timer as she starts the flight sequence, flipping the shuttle from stealth mode to full power and breaking the docking seal. “What took you so long?” she asks with a half-remembered hint of humor. “I thought I said be back by eleven minutes to zero.”

“Some bucketheaded geniuses got in my way,” Leia says, annoyed, dropping a length of metal pipe that hits the floor with a resounding clang.

Ahsoka has a hand on the throttle as the docking equipment retracts with agonizing slowness. Her younger counterpart wasn’t supposed to encounter any troopers on the path they’d mapped through the destroyer, which raises a hint of alarm for Ahsoka because it means they miscalculated, but she can’t quite quell a flicker of amusement; trust Leia to deal with unexpected problems by bashing people with spare parts from the ventilation system.

The shuttle finally disengages and Ahsoka slams the throttle. Fifty-three seconds at sublight until they can jump… She glances at Leia. “Did you get the star charts?”

Quick grin. “Yes.” The thin combat helmet Leia wears to obscure her identity hits the deck with another clang, and she reaches into the lining of her boot. She pulls out a small black datachip and holds it up for Ahsoka to see. “All of them.”

Ahsoka allows herself a small smile. “Well done.” If they can make it out of here, they’ll have succeeded. Forty-six seconds until hyperspace.

Leia glances casually out the back viewport of their stealth shuttle. “Also their ship’s going to explode.”

Ahsoka’s locking in the jump coordinates. “The server wing, you mean?” Four minutes twenty-three seconds until the attobomb Leia planted in the section of the destroyer that holds the records detonates, destroying all forensic trace of the data they took.

“Nah, the whole thing. I put the attobomb in the hyperdrive compartment.”

Ahsoka’s fingers had been flying over the control panel on autopilot, but her hands miss a beat and she has to look back to find the next switch she needs in the jump sequence. “You _what?_ ”

“It seemed cleaner to get the whole ship,” Leia says. “Start a graviton reaction in the hyperdrive so the whole thing goes up. Even the Imperials would figure out why if we just took out the server wing.”

Ahsoka keys in the final string, frowning. “That was a huge risk,” she says, keeping her voice calm but letting the warning show. “There was a reason that wasn’t the mission plan.”

Leia’s unpinning her hair, letting her long braids tumble down her back. “The idiot Imperials on that ship couldn’t catch a drunk bantha with an asteroid net,” she says dismissively. “I knew I could make it to the hyperdrive and back.”

“You _thought_ you could make it to the hyperdrive and back,” Ahsoka corrects. “Just because you were right this time doesn’t mean you always will be.”

Leia shrugs. “When the Empire gets something scarier than a bunch of third-rate backwater nerfherders dressed like moonrocks, I’ll reconsider.”

Ahsoka opens her mouth to point out that the Imperials have plenty of things far scarier than that, but she’s suddenly struck with such a strong bolt of sympathy for Obi-Wan that she’s momentarily arrested. She can remember Anakin all those times, lounging in the pilot’s seat as hyperspace slid hypnotically past the viewport, explaining whatever had just happened on the mission to a thoroughly exasperated Obi-Wan: _Relax, Master, I knew Artoo would know how to put out a propellant fire_ …

She pushes the image aside as a cascading electronic alert announces that the shuttle’s reached base acceleration and is on track to jump; she slides the hyperspace throttle and the stars blur into streams.

**Author's Note:**

> so today i drank a lot (A LOT) of sangria and wrote some random star wars scenes in present tense so here’s one of em ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> you can tell I’m trying to be poetical by the fact that I’ve already misused a colon by sentence 2 lmfao
> 
> anyways i labeled this complete but i kind of want to add to it eventually, however no idea when/if that’ll actually happen so more of a snippety thing for now


End file.
